The British Literature Wiki

Welcome to the British Literature Wiki

A collaborative project by students at the University of Delaware

About this site

This site provides background on, and interpretations of, British literature and culture starting with the Middle Ages and continuing to the present. Students in English 206 at the University of Delaware began this wiki in the fall of 2007 as a kind of online handbook to complement the work they were doing in class. Working in collaborative teams, students chose a writer, a specific work, or the cultural contexts of a literary period, and did some research. The students presented their findings in a way that would be useful to other students and took advantage of the multimedia possibilities of the wiki. The idea of students involved in collaborative, active learning and at the same time modeling for other students new ways to approach and engage with literature informs much of the work done here. This site hopes to distinguish itself by providing high quality, carefully researched work in a way that might encourage others to look at literary works and their cultural context in a fresh way. It also aims at making students aware of issues involved in researching, writing, and presenting their work to a large, public audience. The site is organized by historical period. On the Navigation Bar across the top are links to period pages. Each of those pages has links to other pages about specific authors, works, and historical contexts. There is also a “search” box for locating specific writers, works, or literary terms. Using these things should allow you to navigate the site easily. You can always return to this homepage by clicking on site’s title at the top of the screen.

What’s a WIKI?

A wiki (IPA: [ˈwiː.kiː] <wee-kee> or [ˈwɪ.kiː] <wick-ey>[1]) is a type of website that allows users to add, remove, or otherwise edit and change all content very quickly and easily, sometimes without the need for registration. This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for collaborative writing. The term wiki can also refer to the collaborative software itself (wiki engine) that facilitates the operation of such a website (see wiki software), or to certain specific wiki sites, including the computer science site (and original wiki), WikiWikiWeb, and the online encyclopedia, of course, Wikipedia. Here’s a short video clip on how wikis work: